The Dubious Ethics of ‘Nudging’ the Public to Comply With Covid Restrictions
We’re publishing an original piece today by Dr Gary Sidley, a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist, about the ethics of ‘nudging’ the public to comply with Covid restrictions. Dr Sidley was the organiser of a letter signed by dozens of psychologists and therapists and sent to the British Psychological Association in January that raised ethical concerns about the Government’s use of covert psychological techniques to secure behavioural change. He has now heard back from the Chair of the Ethics Committee at the BPS and, needless to say, he dismisses all of the concerns. Here is an extract from Dr Sidley’s article:
The British Psychological Society (BPS) is the leading professional body for psychologists in the U.K. According to their website, a central role of the BPS is: “To promote excellence and ethical practice in the science, education and application of the discipline.” In light of this remit, I – together with 46 other psychologists and therapists – wrote a letter to the BPS on January 6th, 2021, expressing our ethical concerns about the use of covert psychological strategies as a means of securing compliance with Covid restrictions. In particular, our alarm centred on three areas: the recommendation of ‘nudges’ that exploit heightened emotional discomfort as a means of securing compliance; implementing potent covert psychological strategies without any effort to gain the informed consent of the British public; and harnessing these interventions for the purpose of achieving adherence to contentious and unevidenced restrictions that infringe basic human rights.
Responses from the BPS to our initial letter were slow and circuitous. However, on July 1st we received an email from Dr. Roger Paxton, the Chair of the Ethics Committee, which clarified the BPS’s position: in the Committee’s view, there is nothing ethically questionable about deploying covert psychological strategies on the British people as a means of increasing compliance with public health restrictions.
An in-depth inspection of Dr. Paxton’s defence of the BPS reveals that it is evasive, disingenuous and wholly unconvincing.
Worth reading in full.
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I’d happily look these people in the eyes and tell them how it is. Maybe they’d agree?
Me too. I’d also send them some links to read while in hospital, assuming there is WiFi there.
Don’t you mean, look them in their fake eyes? I’d say that’s another deliberate psychological tactic – cognitive dissonance created by looking at an image of someone we’re being told is a real person, suffering in real life, when the picture is very obviously digitally manipulated (hence unreal) in the area we’re told to look. Nothing like a bit of cognitive dissonance to stop people trying to make sense of what they’re seeing – just do as you’re told instead.
I supported the NHS in early 2020 and all I got was the clap.
“Dubious”. Hmm, that’s a rather generous description of what we’ve seen. Evil is the only thing that covers it.
‘Nudging’ isn’t the word I would use. Emotional manipulation and state sponsored terrorism are more appropriate terms.
The people behind this are evil propagandists.
I feel like looking at politicians in their eyes whilst giving them a lead injection to the head. (I had very little faith and trust in politicians before the Iraq war, it went negative after Bliar’s illegal war. Now it’s at absolute zero).
They are scum.
Their sole role since March 2020 is to enable and justify genocide, eugenics, collateral damage and discrimination.
They can never succeed at the latter, but they are pretty good at the former, I must say.
Same in Germany, there it’s called the Ethikrat and its two evil women who were and are driving it.
We won’t have true equality until women are as evil as men 😉
Alas, we are.
We already are ….. but we hide it better.
I’ve done the NHS a favour and edited their poster (depicted in the title of this thread) to add more relevant information …
(See my post below)
Dubious?
I think you misspelled “Sick, evil, sinister, and civilisation-destroying in its disfigurement of not only the contract between citizen and government, but also the entire social contract that a civil society is based upon.”
But maybe you were sticking to a word limit. So maybe just “Satanic” would do.
I’ve done the NHS a favour and edited their poster (depicted in the title of this thread) to add more relevant information …
.
.
I wish Time For Recovery had been a bit more militant and had followed the exmaple of groups like Led By Donkeys who took over existing billboards and put up their own messaging on them (they did that back when brexit so stupidly seemed like the only issue that mattered and when I supported their billboard hijackings). TFR got banned from using billboards by majr advertising agencies “oh no, we can’t take this, it’s political” said JCDecaux while happily running billboards for elections and for government propaganda. TFR should have turned up at night to a few of the “look him in the eyes” billboards and put these truthful version up instead. I find the imagery of TFR’s versions a lot more moving than the government versions, and of course the words a lot more accurate.
The best public messaging at the moment seems to be coming from.
https://thewhiterose.uk/category/news/
All you need apparently is a cheap thermal printer.
You don’t even need to print them out. For a modest sum they will send you a supply ready printed
Many people are suffering now from mass psychosis and long-term mental damage due to the efforts of the Government’s covid compliance tactics. I fear some people will never be the same again. Truly evil stuff and if those responsible had a shred of morality and humanity they would be begging for forgiveness and trying to correct matters.
Pol Pot never got there and nor will Fauci, Vallance, Gates and their Nazgul aides in other countries.
I want to look at those pathetic men in the eyes so I can firmly knee them in the bollocks!All part of the Mesmerism look into my eyes,series of 3 hands,space, face repeat adnausem and roll up your sleeve for the death jab.QED
Look into my eyes.
And tell me if you see the hatred and contempt for the authors of all of this crappy idiocy.
And why Johnson and his cohorts will NEVER be forgiven.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the top BPS bods are bought and paid for by TPTB. Probably as are all the regulating and professional bodies, and the unions. And the NHS chief execs. I’d be inclined to get back to the BPS and demand that they provide peer reviewed evidence that the level of fear and compliance that the government and SPI-B have been trying to instill within the population is proportionate to the dangerousness of and threat posed by the virus. I would want to start with definitive proof of the isolation of the virus, on which everything else hinges, including the validity of the pcr test as a method of diagnosing covid, and the existence of asymptomatic spread.
Do those people want an entire generation of children to suffer for them? I don’t think so. 1/10 effort for that propaganda.
The world we live in exists in a sea of lies. Perhaps it always has done, perhaps we can just see it now because we have the tools to disect the lies.
As a consequence none of the liars will ever own up to lying, they just double up and carry on.
That is what is so difficult about it isn’t it?
All these lies make me feel quite ill. They are really psychologically disturbing. I suppose this was what it was like to live under any totalitarian regime where you had to pretend to believe the lie.
The problem is that it was much different whilst we grew up.
We trusted, more or less justifiably, and/as authorities/the media gained that trust over time post WW2.
The internet and Covid changed everything.
Us few red pilled with integrity realized it soon, but we were still surprised and appalled nonetheless.
Most of all about our friends of course.
Which in the big scheme of things is nothing new though, and we really shouldn’t have been, see Hannah Arendt.
There is no surprise about the reponse of the BPS. Their colleagues have been used to justify and manage torture as part of the ‘US Extraordinary Rendition’ program.
A guy was water-boarded >100 times, under the care of these Nazis.
Psychology and psychiatry seem to exist primarily as a way of justifying extreme evils, when people talk of scientific sins they mention Fritz Haber’s production of the gas used on the western front (“the sin of the chemist”) or the manhattan project and the development of nuclear weapons (“the sin of the physicist”), in terms of caclulated evil none of this compares to the multitude of sins of psych professionals: “”sluggish schizophernia” in ths voeit union, project MKultra in the US and Canada, planning the tortues used at guantanamo,… Whereas other “singful scientists” made technologies which caused harm at a distance, and could claim a lack of connection with the end use if not a lack of knowledge of how their work would be applied, psychological science sins have taken place at close proximity to the victims with the psychologists/psychiatrists involved knowing exactly what they were directly doing to people, and relishing doing it.
A consultant once said to me that all the weird students at medical school went on to become psychiatrists.
From my own observation of psychiatrists, some appear to be a little Aspergan, maybe cannot relate intuitively to other human beings and try to compensate by medicalising their relations, use of statistics, science, questionnaires etc to work out what motivates other people.
They definitely are a strange bunch.
I would have welcomed the chance to actually look those people in the eyes, and I’d have told them:
“I’m ignoring lockdowns because they don’t actually work, also I’m trying to get back to working normally so businesses can make money and taxes can be paid which fund the treatment that you are in the tiny percentage of people unlucky enough to need. Oh, and spare a thought for the teenage cancer patient in the next ward.”
That sort of propaganda just does not work on those of us who’ve grasped the fact that lockdowns are ineffective.
The message SPI-B was really sending …
Great! So true.
Funnily enough the BPS spent a long time prevaricating over whether or not to have a defence special interest group, presumably because the upper echelons didn’t much like the idea. But they don’t seem to have demonstrated the same set of scruples over the ethics of terrorising the population in 2020.
“I suspect the lady trembling on the pavement, … might all beg to differ.”
Regrettably many of the victims of this torture will never realise they are victims, so many have been so damaged they actively want to be subjected to more fearmongering. Tyranny is rarely recognised by its victims during its lifetime. All the mroe reasonw e need a regime change so we can show the victims what has been done to them.
One of those victims is my daughter, who is in her mid 30s. She is not stupid – she knows the statistics, she knows the uselessness of masks, she understands the basics – AND YET – she is still a terrified wreck. She nearly gets a panic attack every time she goes into a supermarket, even a relatively quiet one, and she panics if there are too many people around. Even a few people on a train for a short journey caused her problems.
Her problem is that she never liked being around a crowd. Back in March 2020, she was being sensible, taking precautions etc, just as the government wanted everyone to do.
By the summer, she was a nervous wreck. By this summer, she’s on antidepressants its so bad.
People like her did not need nudging. The people who did ‘need’ nudging took no notice anyway.
Thanks you SPI-B for wrecking my daughter’s mental health. For nothing.
You have highlighted an important issue – the way in which people predisposed to some anxiety have been pushed over the edge. It’s unforgiveable and contrary to any professional ethics.
BPS – British Propaganda Society?
Correct. A friend who has had a very stressful few years as both parents developed dementia and in due course died coped very well but occasionally suffered from anxiety.
Over the last 18 months she’s had a complete mental breakdown. She’s now a terrified wreck; on anti-depressants and having counselling.
I sympathise,Felice. We have a relative who used to be a normal, carefree woman. The fear has taken a real grip of her. She constantly sanitises everything and her obsessive behaviour is having a very negative effect on her family.
We also have two friends who wouldn’t go further from their front door for over a year in order to protect the wife who was shielding. The husband is now very ill with a serious liver condition.
BPS – another example of the ‘floating turd’ syndrome, whereby organisations are taken over by windy floaters who rise to the top – and smell.
So it is professionally permisible to create fiction (aka lie) to achieve a social end defined by an elite group, independent of the needs of your client? In other words, the interests of the client are defined by government rather than through the ethics of a client/professional relationship?
Psychology as a tart.
Just my thoughts…you can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. An cliche I know but something to remember every time…they don’t have us all in their sick spell!
It was pure evil – wicked psychological abuse – this was a government that ruled by fear and abused its powers.
All those responsible should stand trial for crimes against humanity.
Look these actors in the eyes and tell them to do one.
The best defence against Government fear-generating “nudges” is to switch off the BBC/ITV/Sky/C4 and ignore everything a Government Minister/Spokesman says.
My default assumption is that if any of the above are telling me something, it’s propaganda and not in my best interests so I ignore it. .
Guilt and shame…nothing new here then…its been used by religion for 1000’s of years. Its pure evil.
In a post-truth society one has to say “dubious”. To say “evil” one would have to define “evil”. Actually, in our society might is right as it has no other basis for ethics.
The only thing this poster makes me want to do, is to punch all the members of SPI-B, all the politicians, and the BPS, and keep punching them until their faces are a mush of broken bone. They are ALL so utterly evil (because they know exactly what they are doing) that there is no punishment suitable.
All of them need Nuremberg 2.0, with the death penalty available and used. We must ensure that society, having forgotten the lessons of WWII and the death camps, never forgets how easy it was to implemement exactly the same wickedness again.
Despite being warned and told that the politicians must never go down this route, they still did it. There MUST be punishment for that; they CANNOT say that they didn’t know.